By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
21) Sleeping
Sleep lays under his awareness like a duvet of the mind ready to comfortably billow up and wrap itself around his melting consciousness. He can feel Julie's noises on his eyelids as she moves around the room. The tinkle of wire coat hangers is like an effete ghost shaking thin chains.
He knows that he could, that he should, come fully awake from this heart slumber and that he should offer to take Alice to playschool. It is his job, his part of the domestic bargain. The selfishness of sleep, though, lets Julie painstakingly creep about the bedroom. Her small sounds snag the rhythms of his heart.
Again the coat hangers ping together, the unstructured chimes falling like frozen feathers onto his pink lids.
He thinks no more on her noises. Thought will rouse him to wakefulness.
The bedroom door closes.
Alone, he waits for sleep to rise up and fold itself over him, listens to the delicate voice of his heart claiming his existence.
The kitchen door closes. The pushchair's hard wheels rattle along the concrete path. From over the back a clicking train passes. His mind is clothed and cosseted by the familiar sounds. Beyond the station the train looses a donkey's strangled bray. In the rising grey sleep he notices each of the sounds — a sparrow's lackadaisical cheeping, the murmur of a radio a few doors down — and he ticks each off, nothing odd to disturb him there.
A car keeps its engine running, burbling away to itself. He imagines it pumping out invisible fumes, the carbon monoxide piling up outside the window. He waits for it to stop, or leave, gets himself ready to be angry and awake. His mind drifts aside. He notices that the car has gone. He sleeps.
9:36. He doesn't have to concern himself with the children this day. This day could be his last poignant day of freedom. He decides that, in another ten minutes, he will heave himself out of bed and head for the hills.
commentary.... Paul, like Julie, expected no security. Nor did Paul suffer that other delusion of the young — that life is always happening elsewhere, and so the young go off searching for that glamorous and exciting elsewhere existence. A whole life had already happened to Paul. Consequently he knew that, wherever he was, that was it.
The previous night he had had a taste of being cut off again, of being severed from all ordinary human contact. Locked in that police cell he had had no means of finding out what had become of Julie, if and how she had got home, what her mother had said when she had heard, if the children had gone off to sleep alright.... The very idea of prison again, of being shut away from the daily doings of Michael and Alice, of losing the childhood bits and pieces that they themselves will forget.... At any other time the thought of losing that would have brought him to a wide-eyed rocking despair. Instead, tired beyond further thought, when he had got home he had slept.
His sleeping had offended Julie. Falling out of love with him at that moment, despising him for his bruises, for his again probable imprisonment, she also knew that it was not the end of their affair. They had been together long enough for them both to know that lovers don't fall in love just the once with the one person. They changed, their lover changed. They altered and adapted. They moulded themselves to the new. With the result that, every so often, lovers found themselves falling in love with their partner again. And again. And again. And that was beyond the natural affection they felt for someone they had known for a long time. They caught an unexpected glimpse of their partner and they fell, dropped, wham bam in love again.
This time would that love be for a murderer? Or would they call it manslaughter? No matter, Paul would have killed someone and Paul himself had condemned all such distinctions of killing. 'Romantic murder,' he called the soldiers' killings. Or any other such killing — "...there can be no justification — even in extremis — for killing another person." So he spoke in prison legal jargon. How extreme any justification of course depended on the society. In some cultures an insult was considered sufficient, in others an attempt on one's own life could make it an allowable killing.
"While murder is viewed as a valid option lives will be taken." That Paul hadn't meant to kill the man.... He had already condemned himself.
True Stories
In August 1985 Mrs Winifred Brown, of Bridgwater, was cleaning paintwork in her house when she was hit on the head from behind with a rolling pin. Mrs Winifred Brown was knocked unconscious. The rolling pin had been wielded by her husband, Mr Clifford Brown. During the previous week Mrs Winifred Brown had hit her 57 year old husband with a poker and had broken his elbow.
In August 1985 a milkman, Graham Andrew Glassup of Hawthorne Close, Bridgwater, came to blows with his customer, Michael David Dyte, over a cash disagreement.
Despite having been prosecuted seven times for polluting the environment Nether Stowey landowner, Metford James OBE, was put forward in October 1989 for honorary life membership of the NFU "....for his services to agriculture."
